


invictus

by depugnare, peradi



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Civil War, Kissing, M/M, True Love, captain america is a legacy, pain and suffering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 11:27:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6282760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depugnare/pseuds/depugnare, https://archiveofourown.org/users/peradi/pseuds/peradi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unwilling god of war: the life and death of Stephen Grant Rogers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	invictus

 

“You’re not doing this for some great cause,” says Tony Stark, “you’re not doing this for the sake of liberty or justice or _puppies_. You’re doing this for one man. One man you can’t bear to see suffer.”

“Well,” says Captain America, “that’s sort of the _point_.”

 

\--

 

“I’m Captain America and you’re the Nazi sons-of-bitches,” says a boy with starry dark eyes and a sharp grin. He’s eight, with fists like stones and gaps between his teeth.

“You’re always Cap,” protests his playmate.

“Well duh. I’m the oldest. I’m the biggest. The best. I get to be the soldier.”

“Can I be Bucky?”

The boy cracks his gum, considers. “Nah, got to have someone to fight. That’s how playing Captain America works.”

“Why don’t I be Bucky and -- and Johnny Four-Eyes be the Nazis?”

“He don’t ever play with us; his Mom don’t let him.”

“Well, let’s play ambush,” says the playmate, the boy who is ten years from dying (cancer, knots up his brain, shakes him down to yellow skin and rancid bones).

The other boy grins. It’s the sharp war-hungry smile peculiar to little boys the world over. Making swords out of sticks, guns from two fingers, battles on the edges of playgrounds. “Fine,” he says, “you’re Bucky; I’m Cap.”

The boy hefts his makeshift shield up. It’s a garbage can lid sprayed red, the paint oozing off in rusty streaks. “Captain America and Bucky, off to save the day.”

(“ _Brock!_ Brock! You better not be going to bother Johnny again --” his Ma calls from her steps, hair frayed around her sunworn face. He doesn’t listen. He never does. Mrs. Rumlow -- _Mrs_ , she’s very particular about that, even though her bastard husband’s been gone since the day after Brock’s birth -- kneels to scrub her porch. Wild boys, she thinks; they’re all alike.)

 

\--

 

Since he opened them in this new era, no one has looked Steve Rogers in the eye. They see his face, his mouth forming around words, the star on his breast.

They do not look him in the eye.

They see Captain America; they do not see him. They see _soldier_ and _leader_ and _madthing_ and _propaganda with nice tits_ \-- thanks for that one Stark, really -- but they don’t see _Steve motherfucking Rogers_ , as Bucky used to say.

He gets used to it.

He tells himself: they need Captain America. This is who you are. This is who you will be.

So this is who he is.

Captain America does not swear ( _language!)_ . Captain America does not date ( _pretty nurse, nice smile, nice rack -- no Captain America never thinks these things about girls, Captain America is not a man with man’s thoughts, he does not think that Sharon has nice tits or Sam has a nice ass, he does not think of sex at all_.)

A man out of time. Like a joke. But look: Captain America goes to press conferences and says _I do not endorse any political party_ because Shield says to; Captain America goes to children’s hospitals, the air all fetid with death, and he smiles and dandles bundles of bone and skin on his knee and does not say _why can’t they try the serum on you as well_ . Captain America says: _we live in better times_.

There’s a man called Steve Rogers. He voted for Obama. He has to chew down the word _coloureds_ because when he was little that’s what folks said. He imagines how good Sam would feel under him, open and pliant and warm, and he wonders how Sharon’s lips would look parting in pleasure.

The man is buried deep, deep, deep because this world calls for Captain America and that is who they get.

(Not a man, but a legend.)

 

\--

 

“I was wrong about you. The whole world, was wrong about you.”

“No,” says Captain America, “no they weren’t.”

 

\--

 

Up until the age of twelve, Brock keeps a poster of Captain America in his bedroom. It gets tatty at the edges and there’s a tear where Ma lashed out at him and missed, but it’s still there.

“It’s queer,” says Hunter, cigarette clasped between his teeth. “You a queer, Rumlow?”

The cigarettes belong to Brock’s mother. There’s an itch between his shoulderblades, right on his spine, where she stubbed one out on him three weeks ago, the wound won’t heal, he won’t let it, works it open with his fingernails every time she screams at him.

“Ain’t queer,” he says. “Just a poster.”

“Of a _man_ ,” says Hunter. Hunter’s bedroom is adorned with topless chicks, plastic tits shining. Rumlow fucking hates Hunter.

“I guess,” he says.

He doesn’t take it down though. A year later, Brock’s Ma comes at him with a gun -- _just like your Daddy_ she’ll spit -- and he’s thirteen and strong, and three shots are fired and blood sprays red and high over good old Cap’s face. The poster gets torn down when the apartment is sold. Ends up in a skip somewhere. Rumlow doesn’t think of it again, not till he’s forty three and facing the man himself.

Steve Rogers is a disappointment.

 

\--

 

Here’s what Captain America did in the comic books: kicked Hitler in the face.

(Here’s what Steve Rogers did in the war: he killed Nazis. They did not die shouting evil catchphrases. They did not appear in the next issue, whole and new. He killed them and they stayed dead.)

 

\--

Steve Rogers says that it’s great to have a Negro president and the papers go rabid and wild, words like spit, five hours in press sensitivity training with Maria Hill and Captain America offers the perfect apology. He’s got the smile of a penitent, closed-lipped and earnest, and eyes as blue as the sky and some forgive him and some do not, but most do because he is Captain America, man out of time.

Steve Rogers goes to a mosque, curiosity winning over, beautiful tilework begging to be drawn -- and so he does, minus his shoes, eyes working over the patterns, sketching charcoal lines. He’s photographed coming out and five thousand people tweet _Captain America is a Muslim Sympathizer_ in an hour. Captain America meets with the imam, talks about faiths coming together in the wake of tragedy.

(He doesn’t draw in the press conference. He smiles for the pictures. He is given a list of _questions you can answer_ and he answers them.)

 

\--

 

New York burns. They save the day, but at a cost, and bodies cook in smouldering rubble. A sky greasy with cloud and the aftershock of war. There’s a taste under Steve’s tongue, copper and static, a little like gunshot, a little like a storm. He directs the clean-up crews. They look bombstruck. Haunted. Pale faces, dark shadows hung under frightened eyes, skin all shiny with sweat -- boys and girls who have never known a battle. Steve tells them what to do, where to go, and they obey: not soldiers, not really, but responding to the voice of a man who knows what he is doing.

( _You were made to kneel. You were made to be ruled_ , said Loki, and it isn’t true, it isn’t, Steve cannot believe that it is.)

(No one is made to be ruled. Start believing that and you might as well eat the barrel of your gun.)

“Must be odd,” Steve says to Thor as they heft snarled metal shapes from the road so the fire brigade can get through. “To come back and find that you’ve been remembered as a god.”

Thor rolls his great shoulders back and smiles his easy, golden smile. “It was not always thus,” he says. “Once, I fought alongside them as a warrior and a friend. We drank mead together, sang great ballads together -- I lay with them, and loved them, and walked among them as an equal. Well,” he amends, shouldering half a ruined tram, “as much of an equal as I could be. But I left, and they did not have me to remember -- they only had stories and legends, and bards are wont to exaggerate. They did not wish to recall Thor, the spoiled princeling, but Thor, master of lightning. And so they made me a god, and forgot all about me.”

Thor dumps the tram to the side. He’s got a wistful look in his eye. Steve’s throat is painfully tight.

He says, almost frantically, “That must have taken an age.”

“Oh, one lifetime was sufficient,” says Thor. He’s looking at the horizon, like he sees Valhalla there. “Mortals are creatures of story. They cannot help but tell them. They made me into a god. They call on me before battle. I have inspired generations of warriors. Of this, I am most proud.”

He claps a hand on Steve’s shoulder. Grins white and wide and wild. Master of lightning indeed. “Let us go and feast, brother. We have won a great victory.”

 

\--

 

Coulson’s cards. Torn at the edges. Bloody. Talisman, thinks Steve. Rosary.

_Pray for us now and at the hour of our --_

 

_\--_

 

“So, you support gay marriage,” says Rumlow, mid-spar. His smile is slanted sharp over his face.

“Marriage equality,” Captain America corrects automatically.

“Ain’t it against your fifties values?” Rumlow says, kicks him hard in the stomach.

All the air surges from his lungs, and Steve Rogers gasps, “You son of a bitch. I don’t have fucking fifties values,” and he aims a quick jab at Rumlow’s jaw; there’s a wet organic sound and Rumlow topples onto his ass. Steve gives him a hand back up. Rumlow shows his teeth.

“SHIELD telling you the right words to say, huh?”

(Not so much later, Steve will find out precisely how true this is.)

 

\--

 

“I could keep doing this all day,” says Steve Rogers. He’s eight. Lungs full of blood and phlegm. Coughed so hard the other night that he ruptured a vessel in his left eye; it’s popping scarlet and obscene right up against his iris, blue and red curdling together.

(One day, someone’s going to make a film about _The Young Avengers_ , starring some pretty golden-skinned kid as Baby Rogers. One day, someone will dress their corn-haired boy up in red and white and blue and give him a plastic shield and send him off to Trick or Treat. Captain America’s boyhood was poverty, yes, but it was clean poverty, good poverty, make-do-and-mend, bit of decorous coughing, a mother with kind eyes and a smile stretched tight and she died prettily, slipping off between one breath and the next.)

This is Steve Rogers. He’s a child. He’s mauled by hunger. His cheekbones are stiletto sharp, his jaw outright breakable, his little stomach gnawing itself.

( _Baby I’ve eaten already_ , his Mama will say tonight, and he’ll believe her because he has to; because if he doesn’t, if he tries to make her eat first, she’ll weep. She’ll weep the tumbledown tears of a woman frayed to threads.)

The other boy knocks three of his teeth out. They scatter on the piss-reeking alley floor like dice.

Bucky gets there in time -- this time -- and there’s blood and bruises and Steve Rogers bites the boy’s ear til red drips down his neck, knees him in the balls, gets a _Jesus fuck you’re a fucking animal_ from Bucky but that’s pride in his voice, and Steve grins to hear it. He’s got red between his teeth but that’s fine, he can rinse that out. A bruise blackens his face but that’s fine, he’ll tell his mother he fell.

“Good thing I was here to save you,” says Bucky.

(Bucky didn’t save him. Bucky stopped him.)

“Fuck you,” says Steve Rogers.

(Steve had been going for the boy’s throat.)

 

\--

 

Captain America spends a lot of time talking about honour. About principle. And, yes, Steve Rogers is a man of both of these virtues -- hell, they shine through his skin like trapped starlight -- but he’s also the dirtiest fighter ever to stalk Brooklyn’s streets.

He’d been going for the boy’s throat. Of course he had. The bully was twice his weight, head and shoulders taller than him, fists like boulders and muscle tight under his skin. And Steve Roger, hunger-scarred and tiny, knows this: hit them hard, down they go.

He grew up fighting bullies and all of them were bigger than him and a lot of the time he was knocked down, bruise-smeared and smart mouth split open, but sometimes he won, sometimes he won _hard_ . _Fuckin’ animal_ , Bucky calls him, affection and wonder and Steve glowers up from under his golden fringe.

(He spends his boyhood looking up to Bucky. He never grows out of the habit.)

 

\--

 

“They want me to go and punch ISIS in the face,” says Steve Rogers. “They want me to go and preach against war in Syria. They want me to say Black Lives Matter and Trump for President, Obama is the best thing since sliced bread and Jennifer Lawrence has a nice ass; they want me to be human and not human, they want me to lead them into battle and into peace and they want me to hate guns and love them, to get every pop culture reference and to get none of them. They want everything.”

“And what do you want?” says Bucky. This is how Steve knows he is dreaming: Bucky is here, whole and unharmed and smiling, smiling sure and silver-swift and there’s a scruff of beard on his jaw and a starry glint in his eye.

(Wild boys. All the same.)

“I don’t know. I want -- I want to fight the bullies again, do you remember?” And Bucky -- this Bucky -- remembers, of course he does, for this is a Bucky spun from Steve’s memories. This Bucky is nothing but memory. “The spit and the blood and how we’d knock em down and they’d knock us down.”

“It was simpler.”

“I bit a guy’s ear off once.”

“You did. And _worse_.”

“He was a bully.”

“World’s full of ‘em, champ.”

Another sure sign that this is a dream: when Bucky kisses him, he tastes of minty gum and something intrinsically human. He tastes of the old days, of snatched moments before dances, of nights where picking up chicks was the last thing on their minds. When they were just boys, wild boys mauled by hunger and built up by stories of war.

 

\--

 

“It’s not personal,” says Rumlow, only it is, it really is. He’s a man now, a man who has killed and killed and killed again, killed for a cause that he’d die for.

(“Got nothing against the Jews or the queers or the blacks,” he said to Jack Rollins, when the boy was fresh-faced and new to HYDRA, “which is just as well ‘cos you’re two of three, ain’t ya? Here’s a tip: stop using fucking Grindr. Do something about your Ma’s surname --  Rosenberg, _Jesus_ . Anyway, point is that anyone can fight for us as long as they _believe_ in us.”)

He’s a man. He slams his foot into Steve Roger’s kidney (twenty years ago he’d broken Johnny Four Eyes’s nose, laughing around the blood on his teeth, _Nazi bastard die die die_ ) and he thinks, very suddenly and for the first time in years, of that damned poster, that damned poster with Captain America’s pearly smile (marred by a rusty spray of Mrs. Rumlow’s blood, oh that bitch had died hard, died hard with her throat bubbling red and --) and Brock _remembers_ . Remembers being that loose-limbed little cunt who terrorised the neighbourhood kids, remembers the thrill of red on skin, that first fight, those first games -- _you’re the guy I used to want to be, the cause and the slaughter, the strength and the drive and the fuckin’ soldiers smile_ \-- but Rumlow’s not given to introspection, to deep thought, to anything, really, save the meaty thud of feet on skin.

He doesn’t say anything. And then he burns up, skin cooking into greasy incoherent sprawls, and Crossbones is born.

 

\--

 

Here is what Tony learns from Ultron: he cannot trust himself. He cannot trust his judgement. He cannot make a brave new world with his own two hands, no matter how much he wants to. He needs limits. He needs to _be_ limited.

Here is what Steve learns from HYDRA: he must trust himself. (He can _only_ trust himself). He knows what cause is right and just. He is a soldier, and he will fight for this world (this world is his.)

 

\--

 

“Did you dream of the war?” says Sam, on day fifty five of Operation Find Bucky. They’re in Hong Kong, chasing rumour (she’s a savage, flighty bitch).  “You were crying in your sleep.”

There’s no shame in crying, Steve Rogers knows. Captain America never cries. He’s stalwart. A man made of gold and glory. Beautiful and inhuman. Steve Roger says, “Yeah, I was.”

It is not, strictly speaking, a lie.

 

\--

 

Here is Steve’s dream:

There’s a temple. It’s huge and it is gold, and there’s a statue of Captain America in front of it. Bodies are heaped at the statue's feet. He recognises some of them: Fury, Coulson, Sharon. Some are fresh-killed. Some have been jackal-gnawed. Some are rotting, rancid. Some are brown-stained bones.

“He’s a god,” says a voice from behind him, “and we give our gods sacrifices, don’t we?”

Steve turns. Rumlow’s smile is as spiteful as ever, even with his face burned to shit.

“I don’t want this,” says Steve. “I --” he looks down. Rumlow’s carrying Sam’s limp body, bridal style.

“Falcon fell, didn’t he? Flew too close to the sun and his pretty wings melted.”

“No. No -- he’s not dead, he’s not, this is a dream --”

“Well,” says Rumlow. “Yeah. It is. But it’s true. Real gods demand blood.”

“I’m not -- I’m not a _god_.”

“Oh sugar, you don’t get to choose what people make you.”

Steve screws his eyes shut, like a child. _When I open them I will wake,_ he tells himself.

He opens them. He’s still dreaming. The sky is ruddy with sunset. The air is thick with the reek of blood and rotting flesh.

“You’re a soldier,” says Tony, conversationally. He doesn’t seem to notice that his throat’s been cut. Blood pumps out, slow and syrupy, in time with his words. “You’re a soldier and you inspire soldiers, that’s what you _do_. You were born out of war, Rogers. You’ll never bring anything but.”

“Nothing you build lasts,” chimes in Bucky. He’s sitting atop a pile of wood, hair straggling over his face, metal arm winking in the dying sunlight. “Nothing made from battle can stand, don’t you see?”

Click of lighter. Roar of fire.

 

\--

 

He dreams of the war as well.

Those dreams don’t upset him.

Why would they? It’s what he knows (it’s all he knows).

 

\--

 

Baseball cards. Posters. Billboards and instagram, drawings and paintings and modern sculpture, tattoos and comics. Captain America: he’s everywhere. Inspiring wild boys and wild girls and generations of soldiers, a story, a legend, a god. A god of war -- because his face is painted on tanks and on planes by soldiers, and it’s on that poster Rumlow had (ended up in a skip, splattered red with blood) and it’s on Coulson’s baseball cards and that story (Steve’s story? The Captain’s story? Both? Neither?)  inspired him to heft up a gun and shoot Loki in the chest and that story inspired Rumlow to pick a cause and fight for it no matter what.

Captain America is a _god_.

Steve Rogers is Captain America, but that’s not all he is, it isn’t it isn’t it isn’t. Steve Rogers is a man. Steve Rogers is the dirtiest fighter ever to walk Brooklyn’s streets, Steve Rogers is a _fuckin animal_ , Steve Rogers is in love, so in love his heart could burst from it.

Steve Rogers fights bullies.

The world’s full of bullies and SHIELD kept Steve from fighting the really bad ones (because guess what? They _were_ the really bad ones, the worst of all) and he’s so very tired. Tired of being pushed around and summoned and pointed at things like he’s a dog, an attack dog, his battles cheapened.

 

\--

 

After Ultron. Tony Stark’s plan to save the world. Chain people up. Keep them safe from themselves.

Steve Rogers shows his teeth. “You can’t control people,” he says.

“There have to be _rules_ ,” says Tony Stark, says Iron Man, says the man who built his own legend -- the man who has not been alive long enough to see what happens when people get hold of your story and make it into what suits them. For the first time, Steve Rogers feels very very old.

 

\--

 

“He’s dangerous,” says Tony.

“Yeah,” says Steve, “but you’re not having him.”

 

\--

 

They find Bucky Barnes; Stark wants him to be tried for crimes that the Winter Soldier committed, wants him locked up, crippled and bound and chained. The truth is this: Steve Rogers is Steve Rogers, and not just Captain America, and Steve Rogers is in love. He kisses Bucky very gently, at the corner of his mouth, and he smells blood -- thick and sweet -- and the bitter tang of battlefield ash.

If they hadn’t found Bucky...Steve tries very hard not to think this, because they did find Bucky, because he is here and safe and so very beautiful.

( _He’s a fucking attack dog_ , Tony Stark says, spiteful in his pain and his fear, _only thing is he’s switched sides. Cry havoc and let slip the dog of war. Steve Rogers, you bastard._ )

“You’re starting a war,” says Stark.

“Sometimes you have to,” says Steve Rogers.

 

\--

 

Captain America: a golden god, untouchable, corpses heaped at his feet; a story people take and twist to their own ends; the embodiment of the good bits of war, the triumph, the glory. A myth. Not real. Not real at all.

Steve Rogers: a bastard. A soldier. A god in his own right, not that he’d ever admit it, not that anyone would ever tell him.

The definition of a god: people worship --

(with you til the end, says Bucky, and kisses him, tasting of fire)

\-- and people sacrifice --

(Rhodey dies, a hole punched through his chest, and Tony howls his grief to the sky)

\-- and die --

(Wanda falls with her eyes wide open, Iron Man’s shot smouldering on her thigh, stomach, breasts)

\-- and _worship_ \--

( _When I first met you I thought you were a weak queer bastard,_ says Rumlow, his eyes huge and starry and dark. _You’re just like me, just a soldier like me_ \-- and Steve shoots him, bile sharp and ripe in his throat because it’s true and he knows it.)

 

\--

 

“If it wasn’t for Bucky,” says Sam, soft and thoughtful, a moment of respite in London, just after slaughtering a lingering HYDRA cell. Bucky’s asleep in the next room. Steve can hear his soft, shallow breathing.

There’s a scar climbing up the side of Sam’s face, shiny and gnarled. That’s courtesy of Widow and her bombs. “If it wasn’t for Bucky, would you still have started this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. If we hadn’t found him…”

Steve could say this: _Tony and I have very different views of what constitutes a good world, a free world. After Ultron, after HYDRA...well, war is patient. Like disease, like growing pains, like bone. It festers first in thoughts and words, then eating through hearts and minds. It grows and builds and strains and neither Steve Rogers or Captain America could stand by and watch their world be chained up in the name of security. There would still be a war, of course there would be_.

Steve could say this: _inside me are two gods, Steve Rogers and Captain America, and both were born of war. Both are worshipped and sacrificed to and neither have control over what people do with their story. Steve Rogers can’t stop his friends dying for him, no matter how many times he tries to sacrifice himself in their place, and Captain America inspires generations of soldiers to stand firm to their principles, regardless of what those principles actually are, because concepts like freedom and good are as nebulous as cloud and people make of them what they wish. These two gods create conflict wherever they stand; of course they would spark a war._

Steve could say: _I was Steve Rogers before I was ever Captain America, a scrappy little shit with battle between my teeth and fire in my fists. I fought bullies. I went for the throat. Of course I did. What is Tony Stark but another bully, seeking to impose his will upon the unwilling? He says it is for their own good but so do mothers, fathers, teachers, all that authority that bears down upon you and snaps your spine. For your own good. Follow orders. Do what we say. Of course I would fight that._

He doesn’t. He says, “Doesn’t matter. I’d always have found Bucky.”

 

\--

 

Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes walk hand in hand down a Brooklyn street and it is the single sweetest moment either of them has ever known.

 

\--

 

Afterwards, Natasha says to Clint, “He didn’t expect to make it out alive, did he?”

“Of course not,” says Clint. The war has cost him an eye. Stark’s offered to build him a new one. Maybe he’ll accept it. Probably not. He has children to raise, and he doesn’t want them knowing the taste of war on their lips before they learn to speak.

They’re assassins. Pragmatic. Neither says anything fanciful like _legends always die_ or _stories last longer than the men they are about_ or _they made him a god and forgot about him_.

 

\--

 

“You bastard,” Bucky sobs, his face pressed into Steve Roger’s white, split-open throat. “You left me, you fucking left me, you said you wouldn’t and you left me. I love you. I love you.”

Legends die. That’s what they do. That’s what men do, and there’s no way around it: death is the only sure thing.

And yet Tony is still stunned by the sight: Captain America in a puddle of cooling blood. Gods die, after all.

Bucky’s hunched over him, mouth red from kissing Steve’s cold, wounded face. He snarls up at Tony. “Start running Stark. Start running and don’t you ever look back, because I’m going to fucking kill you I’m going to --”

Fun thing about Vibranium. It’s not magnetic but if you have the know-how and the funds you can engineer a machine that engages with the metal’s atoms and --

The Shield flies into Tony’s hand. Bucky howls.

“You know, we need him,” says Tony.

“He’s dead, you bastard, you killed him, you fucking killed him --”

“I’m not talking about Steve,” says Tony. His voice is shaking. Barnes stares at him like he wants to tear his heart out through his teeth for even speaking that name. Tony’s pretty sure he deserves such a punishment, but he’s also not an idiot: this new world needs him. As it needs its stories.  

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Cap stood for everything good. For glory and guts and strength and the underdog winning out.”

“And he died because a _billionaire warlord_ shot him in the _throat_.”

“Yeah,” says Tony, Tony who had been aiming for the chest, to wound, Tony who was never the best marksman (that honour had gone to Steve.) “But...but we need Captain America. We need him.”

Need him: to endorse whatever compromise Tony can wrangle from the remaining supers, to negotiate with Thor who will probably return when least wanted (vengeful gods, that’s something to look forward to); to be the public face of reconciliation. Need him, because Steve Rogers dying in a pool of blood is not the sort of story you can build a new world on.

They need a legacy.

“I fucking hate you,” says Barnes, teary eyed and red mouthed and every inch the hellhound. He stands up like Atlas once stood, weight of the world pressing down.

“I know,” says Tony Stark. He doesn’t say anything like _it’s what he would have wanted_ or _I’m sorry._ There’s no point. Steve Rogers is dead.

The end.

 

\--

 

Except, of course, it isn’t.

Gods don’t die. Captain America lives on.

There’s a boy with starry dark eyes turning to his playmate and saying, “I get to be Cap!”

“You’re always Cap,” says the girl, pouting. Her hair is a sandy flick, her eyes blue as the sky.

“It’s because I look like him,” says the boy, dark-haired and smirking. “I get to be Bucky; you can be Spidey.”

“I’m _always_ the sidekick,” whines the girl. Then. “Auntie Nat, make him play fair!”

Natasha smiles, weak and wan. “Let your sister be Captain America,” she says, in a tone that brooks no argument.

 

\--

 

There are photos. There are films. There are paintings on airplanes and on tanks, they are wild boys and girls playing the same games, and Captain America endures because he has to, because people love their stories.

Since he opened them in this new era, no one has looked Bucky Barnes in the eye. They see his face, his mouth forming around words, the star on his breast.

They do not look him in the eye.

They see Captain America; they do not see him.

  
  
  



End file.
